May232013

Stefan Weitz of Bing, summarised a core takeaway from the last week’s Google I/O keynote–stating, “Google is a big business and has to make money – off of you. Do you trust Google to do so with your best interests at heart?”

Adding, “But what Google I/O really made clear to us was, under all the technophilia, “Google’s main focus is on monetizing its users’ data. They will be paying more attention to your location, analyzing your photos and turning them into animated gifs and they’d like some credit for their innovations while rarely mentioning that all this personal data collection gives them more opportunities to show you ads”,” wrote Weitz.

What’s different this time is people are beginning to realize what the Google consumer “bargain” really means and are having a conversation about it, he mentions “You know, for some folks – the bargain they strike with Google is fine. Just like personal space in an elevator, people have varying degrees of tolerance for how close another person gets to them, and varying degrees of comfort when that person is actually a corporation not wearing deodorant.”

He then present an infographic to help people learn more about anonymization, Bing vs. Google:

“But I think it’s kind of interesting, that a company that talks a great deal about the possibilities presented by Internet innovation, the open source movement, and freedom of speech, has an ecosystem play that continues to tie their users down to one identity, one technology system, and to an ad-propelled company that can delete what a G + user says without appeal. When you sign onto Bing, you can sign on with Microsoft or a Facebook account. We don’t have to know everything about you to give you a great search experience. And yeah, our maps work, too,” he concludes the post as saying.

Here are some quotes from Weitz’s post:

And again, you may be the sort of person who doesn’t care how close that guy in Google Glass yelling “OK, Glass” stands next to you in the elevator.

On Google’s streaming music services which is intended to crowd out Spotify and Pandor–he said “the true horizons for search and its ecosystem are shrinking, just when they should be getting wider.”

“It is easy to point out contradictions on cosmetic levels – it was ironic to hear Larry Page talk about industry negativity being bad, as his staff made digs at Apple Maps and Page himself explained that Oracle is all about money and not collaboration,” he said adding, “the same time Larry arrived on stage, Google’s lawyers sent Microsoft a cease-and-desist order to remove our YouTube app for Windows Phone, in essence making it harder for our customers to watch funny cat videos.”

Also, Microsoft released a new Windows 8 video advertisement, which takes a jab at Apple’s iPad and Siri voice recognition with phrases like “Sorry, I don’t update like that” and “I’m sorry, I can only do one thing at a time.”

In the new video, Microsoft showcases how Windows 8 lets you use Office apps, such as PowerPoint, while the iPad can’t. The video also mimic’s the way Apple does its commercials, complete with similar music.

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Deepak Gupta is a IT & Web Consultant. He is the founder and CEO of diTii.com & DIT Technologies, where he's engaged in providing Technology Consultancy, Design and Development of Desktop, Web and Mobile applications using various tools and softwares. Sign-up for the Email for daily updates. Google+ Profile.